Reading Out Loud

 

I’m going to be a father within two months from now.  Honestly I’m pretty excited about it all.  The nursery is all assembled (minus the glider which still hasn’t arrived) and my wife and I have been slowly getting the whole house ready for the baby’s arrival (admittedly the wife is accomplishing far more than I am in this phase).  In the last week I’ve started a new thing: I read to the baby at night.

I read on some website or in some book that if the father reads out loud to the baby, the infant is more likely to recognize the voice of the father and will bond faster.  Now I don’t know if this is all true or not, and quite frankly I don’t care.  At first I started doing it because of the bonding thing and because I figured I had better get my reading voice in condition so that I could read to the baby when it is out of the womb.  But now I read to the baby because I enjoy it myself.  For whatever reason I get greater pleasure from reading out loud to the baby than I do reading quietly to myself.  Maybe its because I get to feel like I’m taking part in the pregnancy and playing an active roll, maybe its because I’m just overly anxious to meet my son or daughter, but mostly I think its because I’m sharing something I love with someone I already love and haven’t even met yet.  Whatever the reason may be I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.  Maybe when he’s thirteen or something.

My wife doesn’t mind me reading to her tummy, but she sometimes questions what I read.  At first I wanted to read my schoolbooks, so I could kill two birds with one stone, but she didn’t particularly like me reading to her about the sociology of poverty or the sociology of the mass media.  Thinking about it now I guess I can understand that, but at the time it seemed a little silly (I still threaten to read my schoolbooks every now and then just so I can see the look on her face).  In the end I decided on a favorite book of mine, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight.  Now this is not a kid’s book.  It is really better suited for young adults and adults, but it really is a great fantasy novel and I’ve read it more times than I can count.  My wife wonders about the selection, thinking that maybe it would be better for me to read some of the children’s books we’ve already purchased, but I figure I’ll have plenty of time to read those books to the baby, but I’ll have to wait for quite some time before I can again share the pleasures of some of my favorite fiction.

I don’t know at what age children start to truly comprehend the words that their parents string together (perhaps they never truly understand…which would account for all of the problems with teenagers), but I can only hope that the stories I read help foster a love for reading and for the magical.  There is not enough magic in the world nowadays, but maybe, just maybe I can help my child find a little bit of magic in their every day lives.